p But side by side with Bakuninism, which carried within itself the elements of its own disintegration, there was another trend in the Russian revolutionary party. Extremely hostile to Bakunin’s anarchist philosophy, it agreed with him, as I have already mentioned in the pamphlet Socialism and the Political Struggle, 157 in his appraisal of the contemporary situation in Russia. At the same time, this trend was insured against many of the blunders the author of Statehood and Anarchy made by, so to speak, its lesser pretentiousness and the lower logical type of its line of argument.

p Bakunin sought the justification of the action he suggested in the very process of development of the people’s outlook, but as he used an unsuitable criterion he was forced to substitute the logical leaps of his own thought for the historical development of Russian social life. Tkachov, the father of the trend which we are now going on to, gave no thought to a dialectical analysis of our social relationships. His programme was the immediate conclusion he drew from the statics of those relationships. The contemporary structure of Russian life seemed to him purposely invented, as it were, for the social (which in his terminology meant socialist] revolution. For him, to talk about progress and development was to betray the cause of the people. "Now, or in a very remote future, perhaps never! " was the motto of his journal Nabat. He expressed the same thought in his pamphlet Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia, ^^116^^ and it pervades every line of his "Open Letter to Engels”. Not venturing on to the difficult road of dialectics, he did not make the false steps in logic typical of Bakunin, which he so bitingly ridiculed in his Anarchy of Thought. He was more consistent than Bakunin in the sense that he kept firmly to his premises and drew more logical conclusions from them. The whole trouble was that not only those premises, but also the standpoint he adopted in their elaboration, were interior to those of Bakunin for the simple reason that they were nothing but Bakuninism simplified, a Bakuninism which renounced all efforts to create its own philosophy of Russian history and anathematised such attempts. A few extracts from Tkachov’s works will suffice to prove this.

p Let us begin with his "Open Letter to Mr. Frederick Engels”. The purpose of this letter was "to help the ignorance" of Engels, to prove to him that "the accomplishment of the social revolution is encountering no serious obstacles in Russia" and that "at every particular moment it is possible to arouse the Russian people for a unanimous revolutionary protest".  [157•*  The method he uses to prove this thesis is so original, so typical of the history of "poor Russian thought”, so important for understanding and correctly appraising the "Narodnaya Volya party’s" programme and it anticipates to such a degree Mr. Tikhomirov’s whole line of argument that it deserves the reader’s most serious attention.

p In Tkachov’s opinion it would be childish to dream of transposing the International Working Men’s Association to Russian soil. This is hindered by the social and political conditions in Russia. "May it be known to you,” he says to Engels,^^117^^ "that we in Russia have not at our command a single one of the means of revolutionary struggle which you have at your disposal in the West in general and in Germany in particular. We have no urban proletariat, no freedom of the press, no representative assembly, nothing that could allow us to hope to unite (in the present economic situation) the downtrodden, ignorant masses of working people into a single, well-organised, disciplined workers’ association....” "A workingclass literature is unthinkable here, and if it could be created it would prove useless, because the majority of our people cannot read.” Personal influence upon the people is also impossible owing to the police regulations which take measures against any approach by the intelligentsia to the common people. But all these unfavourable conditions, the author of the letter assures Engels, "must not lead you to think that the victory of the social revolution is more problematic, less guaranteed in Russia than in the West. By no means! If we have not certain of the chances that you have, we can point out many which you have not got".

p What are these chances? Why can we expect a revolution, and what may we expect from it?

p "We have no urban proletariat, that is true, of course; but, on the other hand, we have no bourgeoisie at all. Between the suffering people and the despotism of the state which oppresses them we have no intermediate estate; our workers will only have to fight political power—the power of capital in our country is still in the embryo....

p "Our people are ignorant, that is a fact too. But on the other hand, the immense majority of them are imbued with the principles of communal land tenure; they are, if we may put it that way, communist by instinct, by tradition....

p "Hence it is clear that despite their ignorance our people are far nearer to socialism than the peoples of the West, although the latter are better educated.

p "Our people are accustomed to slavery and subjection—that is also indisputable. But you must not conclude from that that they are satisfied with their condition. They protest, and protest continually against it. No matter what form these protests take, whether that of religious sects—called dissidence—that of refusing to pay taxes, of revolt, or open resistance to the authorities, in any case they protest, occasionally with great energy.... 159 "True, these protests are narrow and scattered. Nevertheless, they prove sufficiently that the people cannot bear their condition and that they profit by every opportunity to give vent to the bitterness and hatred heaped up in their breasts. And that is why the Russian people may be called instinctively revolutionary in spite of their apparent torpor, in spite of their not being clearly aware of their rights....

p "Our revolutionary party of the intelligentsia is numerically small, that is true too. But then, it pursues none but socialist ideals and its enemies are almost more impotent than it, and their impotence is to the party’s advantage. Our upper estates constitute no force whatsoever—neither economic (they are too poor), nor political (they are too obtuse and too much accustomed to rely in everything on the wisdom of the police). Our clergy are of no importance whatever.... Our state seems a power only when considered from a distance. In reality its strength is only apparent and fictitious. It has no roots in the economic life of the people. It does not embody the interests of any estate. It oppresses indifferently all classes of society and is equally hated by all. They tolerate the state, they suffer its barbaric despotism with complete equanimity. But this tolerance, this equanimity ... are the result of a mistake: society has created for itself the illusion that the Russian state is mighty and is under the magic influence of that illusion.” But not much is needed to dispel this illusion. "Two or three military defeats, a simultaneous rising of the peasants in many gubernias, an open revolt in the capital in peacetime, and its influence will be destroyed in an instant and the government will find itself alone and abandoned by all.

p "Thus, in this respect too, we have more chances than you (i.e., the West in general and Germany in particular). In your countries the state is by no means a fictitious force, it stands firmly based on capital; it embodies definite economic interests. It is not only supported by the army and police (as in our country), but is strengthened by the whole system of bourgeois relations.... In our country ... on the contrary, our social form owes its existence to the state, to a state hanging, so to speak, in the air, a state which has nothing in common with the existing social order, whose roots are in the past, not the present."  [159•* 

p Such is Tkachov’s social and political philosophy.

p If by some mistake of the type-setter the above quotations were followed by a reference to the article "What Can We Expect from the Revolution? " Mr. Tikhomirov himself would hardly notice the mistake, such is the resemblance the copy 160 published in April 1884 hears to the original which appeared ten years ago. But alas, what does the glory of the first discovery matter? ! Mr. Tikhomirov does not say a word about his teacher. For his part, the author of "Open Letter to Mr. Frederick Engels" did not consider it necessary to refer to Statehood and Anarchy, which had already been published in 1873 and contains the same account of Russian social relations and the same assurances that the Russian peasant is "communist by instinct, by tradition”. Frederick Engels was perfectly right when he said in his answer to Tkachov that the hitter’s argument was based on "Bakunin’s usual phrases".

p But what does Bakuninism lead to when it has lost faith in the possibility of removing the "unfortunate features" of people’s ideal by direct influence and has concentrated its attention on the fortunate circumstance that our state is " hanging in the air" and "has nothing in common with the existing social order”, that the "accomplishment of the social revolution presents no difficulties"? It is easy to understand what it leads to. If "capital in our country is still in the embryo" and "our workers have to fight only the political power" of tsarism; if the people, for their part, "are always ready" to rebel just as Pushkin’s Oncgin is to fight a duel, the revolutionary struggle acquires an exclusively “political” character. But as, moreover, we are unable "to unite the downtrodden, ignorant masses of working people into a single, well-organised, disciplined association”, or to create a working-class literature and as it would even be useless to do so, it appears that it is not the workers at all who have to wage that political struggle. This must be the concern of the same "numerically small revolutionary party of the intelligentsia" whose strength lies in its socialist ideals and the impotence of its enemies. But, owing to contemporary Russian conditions and also the very substance of its relations to the other social forces, that minority, which is strong because of others’ weakness, has no alternative but to set up a secret organisation and prepare a coup d’etat in anticipation of favourable circumstances for a decisive blow-"military defeats" of Russia, "simultaneous risings in several gubernias”, or "revolt in the capital”. In other words, Bakuninism, having lost faith in “progress”, leads us direct to conspiracy for the overthrow of the existing government, the seizure of power and the organisation of a socialist society with the help of that power and the Russian peasantry’s "inborn and traditional" inclination towards communism. We saw all this in Tkachov’s works long before we beheld it in Mr. Tikhomirov’s article.

p But to acquaint ourselves fully with Tkachov’s programme or, as he said, the programme of the "group to which all that is 161 courageous, clever and energetic in our revolutionary intellectual youth belongs”, we must turn to other works of the editor of Nabat, since the "Open Letter" contains only the assurance that "the contemporary period of (Russian) history is the most convenient for carrying out the social revolution”, and references to such "general features" of the programme as "a direct appeal to the people”, the creation of a vigorous revolutionary organisation and strict discipline. From the pamphlet Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia we shall get the original thought that "a forcible revolution can take place only when the minority refuses to wait for the majority to become conscious of their requirements and decides, so to speak, to impose this consciousness on the majority”. Finally, in the collection of "critical essays by P. N. Tkachov" published under the general title Anarchy of Thought^^118^^ we actually find in the chapter directed against the programme of the journal Vfieryod and the pamphlet Russian Social-Revolutionary Youth ^^119^^ the following alternative: "One of the two: either the intelligentsia must take power in its hands after the revolution, or it must resist, retard the revolution until the blissful moment when the ’popular outbreak’ no longer presents any danger, i.e., when the people have assimilated the results of world thought and acquired knowledge which is beyond them.” The mere circumstance that this knowledge is admitted to be "beyond the people" makes it clear where P. N. Tkachov’s sympathies lie.

The organisation of a conspiracy to seize power becomes the main practical task of propaganda in the newspaper and then in the journal Nabat. Parallel with this goes propaganda of terror and the extolling of "the so-called Nechayev plot" at the expense of the propagandist circles. "For us revolutionaries, who no longer wish to tolerate the sufferings of the people and can no longer bear their shameful slave-like condition, for us, whose view is not dimmed by metaphysical ravings and who are profoundly convinced that the Russian revolution, like every other one, cannot take place without the hanging and shooting of gendarmes, public prosecutors, ministers, merchants and priests, briefly, cannot take place without ’a forcible upheaval’, for us materialist revolutionaries the whole question boils down to acquiring the power of the authority which is now directed against us.’ These lines, printed in 1878,  [161•*  when nobody even thought of forming the "Narodnaya Volya party”, show clearly enough where we must seek the source of the practical ideas whose dissemination this party took upon itself. We therefore 162 think that the editors of Nabat were right in their way when, noting in 1879 "the complete fiasco" of going among the people, they added proudly: "We WOT the first to point out the inevitability of this fiasco; we were the first... to implore youth to abandon that fatal anti-revolutionary path and to return once more to the traditions of direct revolutionary work and a fighting, centralised revolutionary organisation (i.e., to the traditions of the Nechayev trend). And ours was not a voice crying in the wilderness....” "The fighting organisation of the revolutionary forces, the disorganisation and terrorisation of the government authorities, these have been from the very beginning the basic demands of our programme. And at present these demands have at last begun to be put into practice.” Carried away by terrorist activity, the editors even state that "at present our only task is to terrorise and disorganise the government authorities".  [162•* ~^^121^^